Chicken & Egg
Fiction by Shashi Bhat
On a bright, cold morning, your body is cobra-posed, palms pressed down on the bedroom carpet. As you pull yourself up, your fingers scrape together a tumble-weed of hair. You imagine it float-rolling away down a desert road. Didn’t you just vacuum yesterday?
In the shower, you glance down and see a slender claw reaching through the water. You vault over the tub edge, fumble for your glasses, wipe off steam with your thumbs. No — you look closer — not a claw, but a dense twist of your own hair, sliding into the drain, a snarl of skin cells and grime.
The average person loses a hundred hairs a day, says the internet. You once reassured a man by saying you loved him for a hundred reasons. He had said that wasn’t very many, but to you it felt like hyperbole. A hundred is a lot. A hundred and one Dalmatians, for example, is an unusually high number of Dalmatians. But there are more than a hundred hairs on your bedroom carpet now, and more coiled in the drain, and more nesting in your hairbrush like strange dark birds.
In the waiting room of the walk-in clinic, you watch the blonde heads of two children who play on the floor in the corner, moving painted wooden beads along a wire.
“It could be due to stress,” the doctor says, slipping on gloves to poke at your follicles.
“I’m stressed, for sure,” you say. Who isn’t?
“Any illnesses recently? Usually it takes a month or two before you see hair loss,” he tells you, removing the gloves and swiveling back to his computer. He scrolls the mouse down a white screen. Clicks and types. Says something about cortisol. Prescribes an iron supplement.
Stop touching your hair, says the internet. You pretend you’re wearing an astronaut’s helmet; when your hands go reaching up, your fingertips press against an imaginary polycarbonate shell. Eat more protein, says the internet. You tally each gram. You flake chinook salmon into glistening salads. You click open pistachios and chew them into pulp. You hardboil batches of eggs and transfer them to a ceramic bowl, where they drip and rattle conspiratorially. You tap them with the base of your spoon until cracks blossom, then you pluck off eggshell shards. You prepare eggs for dinner: frittatas trembling with soft feta and herbs. For brunch you eat chicken and eggs together in a meal: mother and child embracing on the plate, yolk and breast impaled on the same sharp fork.
In a month there are visible patches of scalp, untanned like the skin of a witch. At the salon you request a trim and a chemical curl. Between each precious snip, the stylist clucks, “Such a shame. Have you tried an olive oil treatment?” The scissors hover and snap.
At Christmas, your brother’s two-year- old doesn’t recognize you. The hair falls from you like needles from a shaken tree. “Have you tried seeing a doctor?” asks your sister-in-law, her upper lip sweating as she stirs and stirs a pot of mulled wine.
The doctor prescribes folic acid and b vitamins and tells you to return if you don’t see results. The doctor prescribes hormone therapy and tells you to return if you don’t see results. The doctor prescribes a foam, which you massage into your roots each morning, unsure if the alcoholic sting means it’s working. The doctor prescribes steroid injections. He stands beside you and feels around your skull before positioning the needle, a taptaptap before each efficient plunge.
“It’s not working,” you say to the doctor when you return, after seeing no results. “I did some research online and thought the next step might be a scalp biopsy? Or we could...”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” says the doctor, swiveling his chair toward you for emphasis, “I’m the doctor.” He prescribes immunosuppressants and tells you to return if you don’t see results.
You catch a virus. You leave work at ten am after arriving at nine AM. During red lights on the forty-minute drive home, you suppress nausea by digging your thumb into an acupressure point two finger-widths below your wrist. You open the car door to spit yellow bile. You sleep through the mid-day fever and dream your scalp is a removeable cap and lift it to reveal your hair growing insidiously inward. You dream of those hairs, spongy and umbilical, worrying through your arteries like a worm through a plastic straw. You dream that a fishtail braid has replaced your spine. Your sheets churn with you, damp with perspiration, and you wake up breathing the mushroom stink of your own electrolytes. The virus moves as slowly as aging. Out of clean bed sheets and too weak to carry the laundry basket down the stairs, you lie on the bare mattress in an embryonic curl, yielding to its insistent springs.
In the Emergency Room they say you’re overexerting yourself. They direct cold saline through a needle into your shriveled vein. You sense the hair perpetually falling, to your shoulders, into your hands, on to the papery pillowcase. There’s a tiny, high-up television in your hospital room. You change the channel every time a shampoo commercial comes on.
What happened to your hair? they ask.
You lost it after an illness.
You lost it after your relationship ended.
You lost it after a bad scare.
A colleague assumes you’re undergoing chemotherapy and gives you a crimson scarf. You accept the gift without comment and swaddle your bare head, feeling the fabric’s cool sheen. You eschew wigs but buy a vintage fedora and wink at yourself in department store mirrors. Under dressing room fluorescents, you examine what’s left. Are the pores expanding? They are craters below your probing fingers. Peering into one, you can see inside to your body’s finite universe. Leaving the shopping centre, you pass a salon and shudder at the smell of propylene glycol. You kneel to the greasy tile and gather armfuls of stranger hair, while someone in the background calls security. You stuff the hair in your purse to later glue into an impenetrable disguise.
Have you tried mindfulness training? Have you tried exercising? Have you tried healing vibration frequencies? The mean green smoothie? Shark cartilage? Breathing through your left nostril instead of your right? Abstaining from water on the Full Moon? Have you tried this bottle with murky contents, labelled “Drink Me”?
On Valentine’s Day, you throw a small gathering. You can’t figure out how long it’s been since you’ve seen anyone. Months? Or years? Your friends come over and sip cloying liqueurs and crunch through heart-shaped sugar cookies, snapping them in half, slurring and lounging empty-stomached over your sofa. You check the kitchen, where a ham waits plump and humid behind the oven door. You pull out the roasting tray with silicon mitts and set it on the counter while you adjust your slipping scarf. A single long hair lands across the meat’s burnt skin, but you feed it to them without apology, grinning into their horrified faces. “It’s the last one,” you say, laughing. So they laugh too, and wrap their arms around you and eat and eat until it’s gone.
After they’ve left, you search the cupboards. You remember a movie you saw once. You think it was on CBC. This kid loses his hair — you forget how — and ghosts approach him in the night with a secret hair-growing recipe that lists ingredients from the boy’s own mother’s kitchen. His hair grows then: Insanely! Uncontrollably! It pours down with such volume and force that the kid sitting behind him in school must keep chopping at it with a cartoonishly large pair of scissors. An entrepreneur kidnaps the boy and uses his hair in a factory where children make enchanted paintbrushes and stylish jackets. Couldn’t the cure be anything? It could be anything left out there on the table — the potato vodka you found in the freezer after they ran out of drinks, or the guacamole, oxidizing in its dish. Or dish soap or buckwheat flour or garam masala or... Cross-legged on the tile, you mix in a little bit of everything; you forego the mixing spoon; you slap your sticky, fragrant hands together and goop it on thickly, your former hair between your fingers like a phantom limb.
When spring comes, you bury seeds and bulbs in the coarse soil, an inch apart in your four-square-metre yard. As weeks pass, perennials mingle wildly, but you remain as hairless as steel. At the garden store, you’re pushing a cart full of wire fencing, when you spot that man, the one you loved for approximately eighty-five reasons. You notice his hair, how lushly it grows, as though fertilized. Abandoning your cart, you touch his shoulder, and he turns around and says,
“Yes?” and looks quizzical, as though he’s pretending not to know you, which does seem the kind of joke he might make, except he isn’t joking and doesn’t recognize you.
“Don’t you know me?” What if you have imagined your own existence?
His eyebrows bloom, and he says, “Oh... what...” then, gently, “I’m sorry,” but you can’t tell what he’s apologizing for.
That afternoon, you return to the doctor. The waiting room is an empty womb. You ask him what’s next and he swivels toward you. His hands hold nothing. He says, “You did this to yourself. You waited too long. You have only yourself to blame.” »